How did it happen? How did this country get into the sorry state it is? America today is a place where presidential elections are stolen in broad daylight—and the Supreme Court then sanctions the thievery. Where a debacle like 9/11 takes place, and yet not a single person gets fired. A country where an administration can launch a phony war with Iraq—needlessly losing thousands of young men and women and countless billions in dollars—yet the Speaker of the House says that giant fraud was not grounds for impeachment. A country in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased over 1,000% since 1972—yet both the middle class and working class are worse off now than they were then. A country where a con artist like Bernie Madoff could actually rise to be president of NASDAQ. A nation whose politicians allow casino-like gouging on Wall Street, and then when the bubble bursts, the tax-payers bail out the looters to the tune of a trillion dollars. And they have to, because if they don’t their IRA’s, pensions, and annuities could disappear. It’s a country where the moderate Republican Party of Eisenhower became the extremism of Gingrich and DeLay. The US is a place where a right-wing foreign billionaire like Rupert Murdoch can convince a large part of the public that somehow his interests coincide with theirs. It’s a nation whose populace is so cowed and misinformed that they could consider a shallow frat boy like George Bush Jr. for president—not once, but twice. And then, when he cheats his way into office both times, the MSM actually tries to cover up for him. After all, the only price paid was the financial bankruptcy of the USA. A country, which, as conservative banker Charles Morris has written, is “hopelessly in hock to some of the world’s most unsavory regimes.” And part of that transfer of wealth was made possible by companies like the Carlyle Group, led by former “representatives of the people” like George Bush Sr., James Baker, and John Major.

In other words, the USA today is a second-rate nation which veers violently from national scandal to senseless war back to national scandal. And the purveyors of neither the wars nor the scandals are ever actually called to account for their sins. Consequently, the cycle continues downward. With no real light at the end of the tunnel. When you can pull off a crime like what just happened on Wall Street, and make average Americans foot the bill—well, that should tell you what the USA has become: a giant ATM machine for the wealthy. Except in the end, you find out they had access to your account. And the politicians in Washington don’t really give a damn.

How did things go so awry? To the point where, to use some appropriate hyperbole, America reminds some of the last scene of fire and smoke in Nathanael West’s memorable apocalyptic novel The Day of the Locust. Many people are aware of the condition of course. Which is why alternative forms of media have arisen. Because, to put it mildly, the MSM has not done a very good job keeping the wolf from the door. In fact, many citizens think they helped the animal up their sidewalk.

For me, alternative media has not been up to the task, at least not yet. As I have noted on this site, the likes of blogs like Firedoglake and Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo have been rather disappointing. For me, before a nation can deal with its present, it has to be able to face its past. Its real past. In other words, the public has to be made to understand the depth and breadth of the historical crimes in order to explain how, for instance, an administration can simultaneously fire eight US attorneys and lie about it before Congress. And the following Democratic administration chooses not to try any of the perjurers or the perpetrators. This is pretty much saying that the law is what the occupiers of the Department of Justice say it is. And in the case of Don Siegelman, Cyril Wecht, and others, new Attorney General Eric Holder replies, “Well, too bad, but I guess it was.”

For those of us who recall a better America, this will not do. Therefore we have tried to give history back to the people in an honest and investigative way. We did it when Lisa Pease and myself published Probe bi-monthly. We tried to do it in our book, The Assassinations. And John Kelin and I do it here on this site, e.g., Roger Feinman’s fine essay on Sonia Sotomayor.

Dean T. Hartwell has now made his contribution.

His short book, Dead Men Talking, is subtitled Consequences of Government Lies. It is a concise attempt at what some people call revisionist history. Except that it stretches across the decades from 1963 to 2001, nearly forty years. The Assassinations, was also an attempt at revisionist history. But it only covered five years: 1963-68. It took in the murders of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert Kennedy. We did that because we thought that by centering on those four people, we could concentrate on both one time period, and also one method of covert operation: the assassination of political leaders by gunfire. Then, in the Afterword of that book, I tried to isolate these events by saying they constituted a landmark in American history. Hartwell decided to take two of these assassinations—the Kennedys—and combine them with the attacks on the USA of September 11, 2001.

Hartwell begins the book by countering the mocking tone that the MSM uses to discount the idea of “conspiracy theories.” One method he uses is rather simple: If the official story is harder to swallow than an alternative theory, then the public has every right to question the official story. Especially when it makes no sense anyway. The idea that a mediocre—or worse—rifleman like Lee Harvey Oswald could actually better the performance of almost every marksman who ever tried to duplicate his alleged feat is hard to swallow. And when you add in the fact that the Warren Commission could never duplicate the condition of the magic bullet, i.e., CE 399, in any of their tests—and actually tried to cover that fact up—well that gives us reason to wonder. He also mentions the recurrent use of a patsy, or what he terms a scapegoat. The labeling of Oswald as an anti-social Marxist helped to compensate and distract from the weakness of the evidentiary case against him. The author also notes that the official investigations often fail to properly address relevant and controversial facts that are necessary to uphold their stories. In the JFK case for instance, an example would be the location of Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the shooting.

Hartwell also mentions other precedents for government officials lying to the public about acts of state. Two being the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and the 18 1/2-minute gap in the famous Nixon-Haldeman tape three days after the Watergate break-in.

… When I finished the Afterword to The Assassinations I wrote that, as in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, after the murder of RFK, those who believed in him and his cause felt like the stone was at the bottom of the hill. And they were alone. Today, we are not. History has caught up with some of the public. They don’t like what America has become either. In that regard, we need more people like Dean Hartwell. Because if The Assassinations was a pebble thrown into the polluted stream, this book provides another stepping-stone beyond it. And hopefully, one day, a man the stature of Carroll Quigley will arrive to trace the decline from November 1963, to March of 2003, filing out the entire canvas with color and perspective. In order to make the public face the fact that, yes the forces that killed the vibrant progressive energy of the sixties won, but what did they bring us? The answer is: Less than zero. Or as James Joyce once wrote for his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” Few who were alive in 1963 would argue the fact that the country we live in today does not resemble what we had then. Hartwell’s effort is that of a true patriot offering an attempt to bridge that gap and explain how it all happened. For the benefit of us all.

“Dean has published a very clear introduction to…atrocities, most significantly the events of 9/11.”

Planes without Passengers: the Faked Hijackings of 9/11

Bill Giltner, Grand Chessboard

As many diligent researchers know of the WTC and Pentagon events of 9/11/2001 (what Barry Zwicker refers to as The Grand Deception), various popular culture accounts (TV, radio, movies, YouTube, newspapers, etc.), as well as the 9/11 Commission Report leave is a massive untold story of what really happened that day. For some of us "truthers", books such as Webster Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror, or one or more of David Ray Griffin's books have been have been welcome additions to unraveling the unexplained, and mostly undiscussed, oddities of 9/11. Yet, for the patient and thorough researcher, the particulars of what is fact and fiction is unbelievably stark, and unfinished. Our task is: find a path to knowledge of how much of the 9/11 myth must be excised to find a foundation for the clear-eyed retelling of how the deception was created and managed.

In the context of making sense of how to reconstruct what did and didn't happen on 9/11/2001, Dean Hartwell has provided a much needed re-shuffle. Dean's focus is on the flights and passengers, tough-minded, and forthright, putting aside arguments about foreknowledge, missed opportunities for rounding up the "hijackers" prior to the "plot", bombs / nano-thermite in the WTC, etc. In doing so, Dean exposes the reasons to not only doubt the essence of the argument that "hijacked planes" resulted in WTC destruction, and the curious Pentagon strike, which Lynn Cheney told Laura Bush was originally intended for the White House. In the place of the parroted "hijacking by evil maniacal Arab terrorists", Dean presents the strong case that most everything related to the "hijackings" was planned and manipulated as a cover story.

The line of thinking which Mr. Hartwell explores is not as novel as many may suspect. Although Dean steers away from much of radar, pictorial, and video records of the "flights", the best evidence in these areas back of his thesis in spades. Dean gives credit to the trail blazers who have served admirably and well, and he notes FOIA requests which have been placed to pursue the quest to get the facts right with respect to the flights and passengers. Dean lays out the case, showing where much more info and research (and pressure by the research community) is needed.

This book is a must read for every 9/11 researcher who wants to break free of the false premises which have weighed down much of the popular debate within the "truther" communities, and elsewhere.

Alex Thomas, Co-Founder of the Intel Hub

“Thank you for writing such a great book. I like the way you lay it out in a very easy form so that anyone can understand it.”